Yield Architecture cover image

Yield Architecture

Jake Syersak

2018

$9 (shipping included)

Jake Syersak was born and raised in rural Washington state and holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. He currently lives in Athens, GA, where he is pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. He is the author of several chapbooks, including These Ghosts / This Compost: An Aubadeclogue (above/ground press) and NEOCOLOGISM: Encyclopedic Entries for Treading the Anthropo-Scenic Psyche (Shirt Pocket Press). He edits the poetry journal Cloud Rodeo, serves as a contributing editor for Letter Machine Editions, co-edits the chapbook press Radioactive Cloud, and co-curates the Yumfactory Reading Series.

“Jake Syersakʼs debut collection pulses with seeking exaltation, stunning inquiries into what it is to make art in the disintegrating present, refracted through ekphrastic missives to fellow artists. Part entreaty and part ode, the poetʼs call rings out to reach far-flung companions, uniting us in re-seeing the world through lament and inquiry. Syersakʼs poems listen for the silent textures, feel through the gravity that separates each from all, somehow discovering a song to show us what resists mere utterance. Yield Architecture is an echolocating cry from the future all the way back to now.”

—Joshua Marie Wilkinson


“Jake Syersak’s surprising sentences, with their often ‘elastic’ syntax and at once casual and risky comparisons, amount to a ‘series of perforations performing.’ The intention is to dissolve stuck-to-themselves forms—e.g., ‘dear architecture,’ and language itself as suited up to do business—and enjoy the freedom in the transition toward ‘castles in the air’ while avoiding the easy dodge of nonsense. ‘Toward’ and ‘from’ are frequently used fulcrums. To go from a carousel toward the ‘zero’ it describes isn’t so much to abandon architecture as to rival its effects with one’s own crafted dizziness. Syersak recreates, blows up in degree and scale, the ‘tensile ecstasy’ of a marriage of constant discourse with metaphoric wildness. He speaks of Ai Weiwei’s Bird’s Nest—that astonishing partial deconstruction of architecture, that contradiction between massy strength and perforations, that structure of holes—with authority, as one who is in his own right an inventor of a contradictory aesthetic.”

—Cal Bedient